Compaq deskpro en \ VOGONS

Compaq deskpro en

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First post, by soviet conscript

Posted on 2014-03-14, 22:15

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recently aquired and restored a compaq deskpro en, the really small form factor. I thought it would make a decent win98 machine and light DOS machine for a situation where little space was avaliable. all it really needed was RAM and a floppy drive which I had laying around, that and a reinstall of Win98SE and relevent drivers

866mhz Pentium III
512MB RAM
15GB hdd
1.44mb floppy drive
50x CD-ROM drive

The on board video is via the Intel 815E chipset which i read is somewhere about the power of a TNT 1. The on board audio is also OK, Its nothing spectacular and I cant seem to find specifics on it. The internal speaker is actually not to horrible either if you don't have space to use external speakers. I can get sound detected fine in Windows games and after some playing around I can get sound and music working fine in later DOS games like Duke3d. I set music to sound canvas or general midi and it sounds....OK. older DOS games like wolf 3d I get sound effects but no music.

I have 3 PCI slots via a riser that I was considering using to upgrade the machine. I don't really want to put to much money into this thing so it will probably just be whatever I come across super cheap at Goodwill or thrifting this weekend. can anyone confirm the power of the graphics on the Intel 815E? my best free PCI card I have right now is an ati rage II+DVD and a Diamond stealth card based on the rendition Verite 2100 but I'm guessing that may be a slight step down from the on board. As for sound I do have a spare Monster 300mx Vortex based card but when I installed it I got a message about not being in a primary PCI slot so I couldn't use sound in DOS or the gameport. I assumed this was because of the riser setup.

Reply 1 of 4, by LunarG

Posted on 2014-03-17, 16:31

LunarG Offline

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Using PCI soundcards in DOS is a bit hit or miss at the best of times as far as I remember. For DOS sound ISA is always the way to go imho, but I guess you've got no option with the Compaq. I don't think the riser itself should affect this though.

WinXP : PIII 1.4GHz, 512MB RAM, 73GB SCSI HDD, Matrox Parhelia, SB Audigy 2.
Win98se : K6-3+ 500MHz, 256MB RAM, 80GB HDD, Matrox Millennium G400 MAX, Voodoo 2, SW1000XG.
DOS6.22 : Intel DX4, 64MB RAM, 1.6GB HDD, Diamond Stealth64 DRAM, GUS 1MB, SB16.

Reply 2 of 4, by chinny22

Posted on 2014-03-17, 19:53

chinny22 Offline

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I've got a few of these back at home. I was planning to use them for a media PC or something similar. Quite nice PC's for their size, and as say while the on board sound/graphics aren't amazing they do the job.
I'm not sure about how the graphics card compares to better cards but doubt an upgrade would do much for dos.

Working on your budget of cheep I'd put in a SBlive which has good dos legacy support if you run your games in Win9x. which a P3 866 should have enough power to do. Win9x games like Age of Empires or similar undemanding graphical games would be quite playable as well

Reply 3 of 4, by soviet conscript

Posted on 2014-03-18, 20:55

soviet conscript Offline

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well I do plan to use it for some win 9x games to. that's why I was thinking about a tnt2 PCI card if I ever come across one for a few bucks (or something of equivalent power). I know some models had on board tnt2 chip but unfortunately mine does not. A sb live! does sound good but hopfully it won't give me the same issues the mx300 card did.